The telephone network has long been utilized as a medium for broadcasting messages of general interest to telephone customers. Thus, customers can dial preassigned director numbers to receive recorded messages such as weather reports, stock quotations, the time of day, the scores of sporting events, etc. With public announcement systems, it is essential that each caller receive the entire contents of an announcement. If the announcements are relatively short, such as the time of day or weather reports, the system can be arranged to repeat the announcement several times. Thus, if a caller is connected to the system in the middle of an announcement, the caller merely waits for the announcement to be repeated so that he can hear the message in its entirety. Many of the prior art systems continually repeat the message for a predetermined interval to allow the caller to heat at least one complete announcement, regardless of when a customer is connected to the system.
While these arrangements are wholly suitable for their intended purpose, they tend to lengthen the average holding time of equipment and may aggravate the caller who has to wait for the message to finish before hearing a complete message from its beginning.